Marius Sperlich (German, b. 1991) is a Berlin-based photographer known for extreme close-up images of the human body, styled with props and staged in high-gloss, saturated color. Working like a director, he plans each photograph around a storyline or feeling, then builds and dismantles physical sets by hand rather than using digital editing.
Sperlich grew up in the suburbs of Hamburg, Germany, where skateboarding and the graphic style of skate videos and magazines shaped his visual sense from an early age. He describes his aesthetic as “anonymous intimacy”, and works closely with make-up artist Joanna Bacas to build each scene, insisting that what appears in a photograph is physically real rather than added afterward in Photoshop. Through humour and glossy, advertising-style color, his images have addressed subjects such as the censorship of female nipples on social media and climate change.
